Environmentally Significant Consumption Research Directions (1997) / Chapter Skim
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5 STRATEGIES FOR SETTING RESEARCH PRIORITIES
5 STRATEGIES FOR SETTING RESEARCH PRIORITIES
Pages 124-137
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From page 124... ...
It also discusses two other strategies: one that proceeds from human causes to their environmental effects, and one that begins with possible policy interventions and considers their effects. ENVIRONMENT-FIRST STRATEGY FOR SETTING RESEARCH PRIORITIES Human activities that directly perturb key properties of the biophysical environment are important research topics under an importance criterion.
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From page 125... ...
. Human beings proximately cause environmental change when they burn fuel and thus release combustion products into the atmosphere; when they irrigate land with river water, changing the composition of the water and the height of the water table; when they cut trees or otherwise alter land cover and the habitats of biota; and in countless other ways.
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From page 126... ...
Greenhouse gas emissions provide a good illustration of the strategy of reasoning backward from environmental conditions to their causes. For many other major environmental changes, the relative importance of various human activities as proximate causes is not as well understood.
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From page 127... ...
Still, the analytical strategy of reasoning back from environmental effects to proximate causes remains viable. It will be necessary to revise the research agenda, of course, as knowledge improves about precisely which human activities are the major proximate causes of particular environmental effects.
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From page 128... ...
Determining which human activities have major proximate effects on environmental systems can point social and behavioral researchers to the broad types of activity that are likely to be most important in terms of a particular environmental change. For example, once the ozone-depleting potentials and the rates of emission of the various ozone-depleting compounds were calculated, it became possible to calculate the overall impact of each gas on ozone depletion, to consider the human activities that release each gas, and thus to identify the most ozone-depleting activities.
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From page 129... ...
Disaggregation can be represented in a tree diagram, as Figure 5-2 shows for greenhouse gas emissions, or in a table. Table 5-1 disaggregates carbon dioxide emissions in the United States by economic sector and purpose within each sector.
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From page 130... ...
An analysis that disaggregated residential energy use according to the energy-saving potential of different household activities showed, however, that infrequent purchase decisions, such as of insulation, furnaces, and major appliances, had significantly greater influence on household energy use than the parallel daily behaviors involving thermostats and appliance use (Stern and Gardner, 1981)
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From page 131... ...
They can affect the proximate causes of environmental change directly and also indirectly by acting on other driving forces. For example, when new chlorofluorocarbon-based technology made air conditioning practical for small commercial and residential uses after 1930, the technological advance set numerous social processes in motion, including large-scale population migrations to hotter climates in the United States, which led to increased use of air conditioning in homes far beyond what would have occurred without the migration.
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From page 132... ...
For instance, intensified agricultural production can increase soil erosion or pest infestations, which reduce agricultural productivity until effective changes are made in managing the environmental changes that the agricultural practices created. A third difficulty is that the relationships among the driving forces generally vary between places and over time.
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From page 133... ...
Research on intervention techniques helps determine what is practicable and cost-effective, identifies the possible secondary effects of interventions and the tradeoffs involved, and contributes to general knowledge about how environmentally significant human activities change. Because this strategy is most often employed to evaluate ways to change consumption, most of its applications are outside the scope of this volume, and therefore no examples are included.
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From page 134... ...
One reason is that the environmental importance of a social phenomenon such as emulation, international trade, economic inequality, or slow transformations of basic social values cannot be estimated until careful analysis has been done. This analysis requires a long time series of multiple variables starting in the past and is likely to reveal that some of the driving forces have only limited environmental effects.
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From page 135... ...
This hypothesis depends on psychological links from values or worldviews to attitudes and from attitudes to behavior, as well as on the presumption that the specific behaviors that may flow from changed values or worldviews will significantly alter the proximate causes of environmental change. Each such link needs to be established to support the hypothesis of environmental importance; the evidence so far suggests that these relationships do exist, but that each of the links is loose (Gardner and Stern, 1996)
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From page 136... ...
Yet another, with the potential to alter the environmental impact of human activity, is a trend in the United States for the management of local resources such a parklands and riverbanks to devolve from centralized institutions to local ones -- a change that may shift management priorities. Identifying such indirect or unsuspected influences on environmental quality may help researchers who are following the environment-first strategy to reconsider and improve their conceptual models.
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From page 137... ...
National Research Council 1992 Global Environmental Change: Understanding the Human Dimensions.
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